The Hollywood Mind is seasoned with certain residents who I came to know as Hamburger Movie Tycoons, people who have made personal fortunes in other businesses besides Hollywood. They come from fast food, land development, construction, or computers—any number of entrepreneurial endeavors that have made them extremely wealthy in their field.
Typically, at least in my direct knowledge, they are good men and women who are more or less beneficent and think they can help make a difference in the arts, can help make better records or movies, and, most important to them, help save Hollywood from itself. Some are proud, with the arrogance of wealth and associations. Some are genteel, with a good heart and purpose. All are lured to Hollywood like a thing drawn to the heat of a flame it cannot see, with no notion of what or where this Hollywood is.
The Hamburger Movie Tycoons cannot be deterred. I think it’s safe to say that before they come to Hollywood, they have never experienced the phenomenon of the terrible Friday Night Flight—watching tens or hundreds of millions of dollars disappear in one hour, starting at 5:00 p.m. on a Friday, on the opening night of a movie that has taken years to make and is 250 percent over budget. It had all the right qualities for guaranteed success, but no one showed up. Nothing ever quite recovers from a bad opening. It is one of the more astounding capital occurrences, a nuclear-bomb-like devastation of wealth and value in the blink of an eye.
I came upon the scene of a minor Hamburger Music Tycoon crash shortly after Jac Holzman and I made the deal to start Countryside Records. This tycoon—I’ll call him Ralph—was building a studio in a California ranch house on a few acres in the San Fernando Valley, and compared with motion-picture-making crashes, this music foray was just a parking-lot fender bender. But it was upsetting to him.
I became friendly with Ralph and commiserated as he regaled me with stories of his entry into the Los Angeles music scene and record-business world. I made him for a good guy, with a decent goal, but he was utterly naïve as to the workings of hardball Hollywood production in any form: music, movies, or TV. I was embarrassed that I knew so much about that awful side of the business. He did not understand what he had gotten himself into. I resisted all his offers to hire me as a consultant, or any attempts to get me to take his money. I never used the phrase “Hamburger Tycoon” in his presence, although I invented it there.
This tycoon was morose, saddened at his failure to create a studio hub for the record business he wanted to start. So after my offer to rent the house for the Countryside studio on a long-term lease, take over the half-finished, nonworking, poorly designed and poorly built studio, and build it out to a state-of-the-art facility, Ralph reacted as if he were witnessing the arrival of an angel.
Once the studio was finished in the little ranch house, Countryside Records had come together. It also came apart very quickly.
After Garland Frady, we signed several other acts and started making demos and rehearsing, but just then Jac called to tell me he was leaving Elektra and the deal for Countryside was being handed off to David Geffen, who was coming in to take over. Geffen, an ex-agent and manager, was an executive star of the moment and had no use for me or Countryside. He gave me the masters we were working on and offered to sell me the studio if I could raise the money; otherwise, Elektra would take over the studio it had built and paid for and leave me with the masters. It was a nice gesture, fair enough.
Under the new deal, I could stay in the studio and use it for a while, but I needed to find funding quickly and set up a new distribution system. I started looking around among the few people I knew in the show-business world, but they were not interested; then I wandered into depths I did not know existed, full of people I did not understand or recognize, a world made of shadows on the wall. I discovered places where music-business people administered the arts like cruel slum lords, stealing copyrights and intellectual property and insinuating themselves into the process without adding any value. They did not know what the process was. They only saw the money.
Ralph, the Hamburger Music Tycoon, saw opportunity and again offered me money and all sorts of perks to keep Countryside going as a business, with him as a funder and partner. He was perhaps not motivated purely by the money, but still I knew better than to accept his offer. He called me up late one night to tell me he had figured out how to solve all the problems of the music business and how he would help me run a new Countryside Records. He said that we should adopt a strict policy that we would “only record hits.”
In this way, he reasoned, all the time and money wasted on recording records that weren’t hits would be saved, and we would quickly get into profits. Artists and distributors alike would line up to be a part of Countryside. I said I would think about it, but I didn’t, and instead courteously closed discussions with him. I knew that to persist would lead to an ultimate sorrow for him and that he would end up in worse shape than when he found me.
Shortly after the collapse of the Countryside deal at Elektra, a whole sequence of unexpected events started, and I found myself in free fall. Every seam in the sack of my life started to split, and all its contents started leaking out. My affair with my friend’s wife became even more horrible to me, but I didn’t know how to retreat. Let’s call her Kathryn, because that was her name. We were thrown together by circumstance, and maybe it was because I was getting desperate that I fell in love with her, or maybe it was really true love. I didn’t know how to tell. I only knew the attraction was impossible to resist.
I wasn’t sure how Kathryn felt, though I suspected we each were a life raft for the other, and in some uncertain way had become each other’s next steps along parallel paths. Even so, I could not shake the terrible feelings I had at betraying my wife and my children and my friend, all of whom had trusted me. It was certainly a nadir for me, a point as far as possible from where I wanted to be.
I had no opportunities as an actor, a player, a singer, a songwriter, or a producer, given my sales history with RCA and my recent crisis of confidence in any ability I might have to pursue goals along those lines. Even those I thought of as friends received me warily.
I had naturally reached out to my mother, whose fortunes were waxing and whose company, the Liquid Paper Corporation, was expanding in leaps and bounds, causing a stir in the office-supply business. Maybe, I reasoned, she would like to go into the record business with me. She was surrounded by traditional businesspeople and sent her top execs out to the San Fernando Valley to meet with me at the Countryside studio, examine the opportunity, and look at a possible fit. I can only imagine how thrilled they were to be sent to meet with the loony son of their chief executive.
It didn’t take long for Mom’s business team to figure out how underpowered my enterprise was, how incompetent I was as a businessman, and how much they wanted to get out of there. Their advice to my mother was something like “Run away!” It was not the thing a mother wants to hear, but the message picked up a little extra volume and urgency when she discovered that leaving my wife and children to flee with a friend’s wife was a real option for me.
David Barry, the Countryside piano player, was the voice of some hope. He told me that he met someone who had just bought him a car and he thought maybe she could help me. She was part of a traveling commune that was coming through town, living in a school bus. He assured me these were not the kind of hippies the conservative press was bashing at the time. These were clean, well-heeled, gentle, and peaceful people who smelled of incense. He thought that the woman who bought him the car might be happy to lend me some money to keep Countryside rolling while I got on my feet. I didn’t have the heart to tell him I had no feet, so I agreed to meet her and see what was up.
As David had said, the hippies were really more a commune of yogis. They were a beautiful bunch, with long flowing hair and fit and trim bodies dressed in colorful tie-dyed clothes or white yoga pants and shirts. The women were pretty, the men were handsome, and they were all healthy and very, very high. They were following a form of Hinduism and trying to live an ascetic life. Their trip looked Keseyian, and even if the bus they were in wasn’t actually named Furthur, they were immersed in the developing counterculture of communes and shared lives. They were educated, calm, and radically left of center, and Countryside must have seemed to them like a good alternative-music enclave—except for the politics of country music, a not insignificant problem. Bringing them into my world, or me into theirs, would create a weird conundrum in my ever-growing sample box of conundrums, but I had little choice, and I privately thought of their presence as a blessing, the slight touch of the spirit of the Merry Pranksters’ stopping by the ranch and nodding their approval.
Part of the school-bus entourage was a fellow who was introduced to me as Ajatan. Jots, as he was more often called, was a big smiler and happy yogi who was fascinated by Countryside, the Countryside studio, and all that surrounded it. He was not a fan of country music, but he and I still got on well. He and his brother, who was a greengrocer in Topanga Canyon, served as a local contact for the traveling band, and the grocery store as a rest stop on the emerging counterculture highway that headed north out of Los Angeles. This group was the first look I had up that road, into what was to become the Northwest Corridor, the new world of settled American Hippiedom—new technology, new religion, and new enterprise, and the first glint of the horizon of the rising Whole Earth.
The lovely lady who bought David the car lent me a little money to keep the lights on, and the merry band started gathering at the ranch and having meals there, which they supplied and cooked and were delicious, as long as you didn’t want meat. While I’m not a vegetarian, I was happy and easy with their presence and their approach to society, to things like cooking and chores and finances and definitions of acceptable behavior. I liked the simple joys, and I was starting to look closely at their alternative lifestyle, one that didn’t require hit records or television shows. After a few weeks, as the yogis left for their Shangri-la of Northern California, I watched them go with some sadness and a nascent desire to follow them.
Kathryn and I had made a mess of our spouses’ lives as well as our own, and between us we decided that the best thing to do was to make a quick exit—maybe even follow the trail of the hippie-yogis. Through all this breakdown, though, Celebrity Psychosis still dominated me, and I entertained the thought that I could make a record in the Countryside studios as a parting gesture; then Kathryn and I would move north just behind the hippie bus and set up a new record company in Carmel, where we would live in my mother’s vacation home. I was sure my mother wouldn’t mind.
Of course she did, but she didn’t say so. My request had gone from needing lots of dollars to save a failing business enterprise to needing simple shelter for me and my girlfriend. This she could provide, and she did.
I asked Phyllis to divorce me, gave her my portion of everything I shared with her, and promised to send money regularly for the kids. She was devastated. I was clueless.
This tragedy faded into the distance as my great nonsense train pulled into another station, and I was sure I would soon be joining hippies who smelled of rosewood, setting up a record company in a resort community, making a record that was sure to lift the general level of consciousness simply by its presence on the planet. What did it matter that none of this was coming together in any justifiable, or reasonable, or even understandable way?
Of course, it mattered a great deal.
What was really happening was I was running off with my friend’s wife, leaving two sad, angry mothers and four innocent kids behind, along with a failed marriage and a pile of unwanted recordings. What was really happening was I was at the bottom of the darkest box canyon I could have been in, without a shred of sunlight.
It is truly said that, only by the blessings of universal order, from such a point there is no way to go but up.
Deep in the bowels of sorrow, in the songs of the hard-laboring, slow-growing, painful life that is mortality, there is embedded a concept shared among country and blues writers and musicians, called High Lonesome. Those two words describe the deepest pain experienced in this life—a pain so intense that to merely describe it is to experience it in some degree.
This High Lonesome is beyond the reach of anything the human senses know. It cannot be seen, heard, or felt physically. It’s accessed only through the heart and soul. It is the essence of loss—lost love, lost chances, lost life—and nothing is ever sadder or more difficult to bear. It is wanting to love—feeling the need to love, deep and real—and having no place for it. It is affection, pure and sweet, with no one to receive it, no one to know it, no one to give it to or share it with, so this feeling sits and wails like a lost child in a desert, nothing for miles in any direction but its own sorrowful sound—a cry not for food, or shelter, or power, or money. This sadness cannot be assuaged by any finite element.
High Lonesome had been the unknown and unintended theme of my life, even when my life looked to an outsider like an example of great success. Buried within the life of all mortals is one resounding and echoing heartbreak after another—one despairing moment repeating and repeating—even if it is unrecognized. High Lonesome is the feeling that accompanies it and is the purest blue the mind can paint.
I always knew I would live full time in Northern California one day, if for no other reason than the weather. But the quality of life and its pacific and beautiful nature entirely suited me as well, and my flight there with Kathryn seemed like as good a time as any to try to bring this nature into my life.
I had been surrounded with the aesthetics of the hippies for a while—pleasant enough—but the yogi life seemed more interesting to me. Among this new group, I could study the yogi writings. I could read and ponder the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita and even Be Here Now. I might follow their yogi trail. I might even live in a school bus with them and do asana in rest areas.
But the music was another thing. I needed my own, such as it was, and such as it had become.
Importantly, I was getting the ever-clarifying notion that I was actually writing my life with every song I wrote. It was too dim to see clearly at the time, but in amarcord it is plain, that with every word I wrote, with every note I sang, my life was fashioned, a life that I would conform to as it appeared.
The prose of the Indian ancients I started reading was familiar and resonated with what little I remembered of Christian Science. Mary Baker Eddy wrote, “Truth is real, and error is unreal. This last statement contains the point you will most reluctantly admit, although first and last it is the most important to understand.” This theodicy seemed settled but still contained many questions whose answers were higher than I could reach. The yogis seemed to have opened another door into the same place. “Maya”—the perceived reality of life, an illusion—“is the Soul erroneously imagined,” so it is written in the Upanishads. Perhaps there was a doorway to new paths here that would lead me out of the awful wilderness I felt trapped in.
I wrote myself through this door of escape. It was the only one I could see and understand. I wrote and recorded The Prison.
In The Prison, the songs and the story that accompanies them are about the gap left between the seeming reality of a finite prison and the metaphor of infinite freedom. Here prison walls nearly—but never finally—close inside the metaphor of finitude-within-Infinity, and so there is a gap, an opening, a way up and out, practically unseen by me until I wrote it down. It was truly the song of my life as it was unfolding verse by verse.
In The Prison, the protagonist, Jason, discovers this gap in the prison. It is a space where two exterior walls do not meet but leave a clear escape, symbolizing the ever-present spiritual sense of eternal and infinite Truth, even as that sense seems surrounded and incarcerated by finitude. Jason walks through the gap and out of the prison but soon thereafter falls into a night so dark and cold that he is sure he has made the final mistake. Crumpled by fear and fatigue, he falls into sleep and into a lonely, tragic place where all he can do is be still and wait.
From this fearful sleep he awakes to the dawn of a new day, a shining sun, and by its light discovers that the prison is of his own making, that the prison is not a fact of life but a dark and temporal belief of corporeal sense. With this new discovery he forges forward into another, higher life—not the life of an escapee or an ascetic but a life of infinite renewal, with a certain promise: despair may not disappear immediately, but it will lessen until it ceases, leaving only the living facts of Infinite existence.
I wrote down the story in prose and married it with music and lyrics, so The Prison would become a “book with a soundtrack.” I wrote and recorded it in just over a week, with me and Red Rhodes in the Countryside studio before I left for Northern California. We put several musicians on it: I played guitar and drum machine, Dasher Kempton played synth and piano, Chura played congas, and David Tate and a yogi choir sang along with me and Donald Whaley. It was an unlikely band made of casual observers, each of whom had something to offer.
When it was finally complete, it was a ragtag recording technically, with some indistinct problems and some glaring ones, but it captured the spirit of the work. The book and record were a package to be read and listened to at the same time. It was a good idea, but in practice it was not widely accessible.
Even so, it was an angel of catharsis for me. It disconnected all the injured, angry, disappointed, disabled ideas and actions, and cut them loose from the pain of one another, and then embraced them in my admission, remorse, contrition, and commitment to reform, my genuine effort to make right in my community what I had made so wrong. It reduced the lattice of pain and fear to rubble, then swept the rubble away with a clean broom, into a dustbin of illusions.
Kathryn and I packed our things and moved out along the trail of the hippie-yogis and landed in the Carmel Highlands. She had been in commercial production for television before we moved, and I was happy and not a little surprised to learn that she was a good and willing partner with a skill for handling a cold sales call. She tackled the job of setting up distribution for our new one-record company by calling out to independent record distributors to find out if they were interested in handling our product, meaning The Prison. Most said no. That did not stop us from trying, and we ordered a stack of records and strove ahead in earnest to make the record company work.
The yogis had moved north to Sebastopol and stayed in touch. So did the IRS, which transferred my delinquent account to a local office, and as pleasant as the IRS officer was—and he was civil indeed—he kept me essentially penniless. I was cut off from any of the assets I had created, such as songs and records and all my other work that had produced or might produce royalty streams. In the mind of the IRS, that was all their money until they were paid.
On a few occasions, the yogis paid a visit to the house Kathryn and I rented in the Carmel Highlands. We had moved there after a few weeks at my mother’s house, once the IRS decided on a living allowance for me. The yogis encouraged me to read the book Be Here Now, the autobiographical story of how Richard Alpert, a Harvard professor of psychology and a close friend of Timothy Leary’s, became—after intense self-experimentation with LSD, a journey to India, and the discovery of his guru—Baba Ram Dass.
I found the book interesting; it fascinated me how close some ideas about the illusions of materiality were to Christian Science teachings. When Jots—the smiling yogi who had been so fascinated by Countryside—called one day and asked if I wanted to go with him to visit Baba Hari Das, who had given instruction to Ram Dass and was living in Northern California at a development called Sea Ranch, it sounded like a fine idea.
Baba Hari Das—or Babaji, as he was called—was voluntarily silent and communicated by writing. Jots told me he would be sitting on the floor or on his bed, so I should be prepared for that. When we met he was sitting on his bed, a slight man wearing a dhoti and a white shirt. He had dark brown skin, flashing deep-brown eyes, a beard, and long dreadlocks piled together atop his head, and he was gracious and very hospitable. I sat across from him on the same bed, and he asked what I did. I told him I was a musician and songwriter.
“What kind of music?” he wrote speedily, with a piece of chalk on a small chalkboard, almost as quickly as one would normally speak, in a clear, nicely rounded cursive script.
“Mostly rock and roll,” I answered.
“What is rock and roll?” he wrote.
I said I would play some. I went to the car, got my guitar, came back, crawled on the bed, sat cross-legged, and played Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode.”
He burst into the widest grin and bounced along with the rhythm. He may have been silent, but of course he could hear perfectly. When I was finished, he asked me to play more, so I played a few more Chuck Berry songs that I knew. In each case, Babaji’s smile grew wider; he seemed enraptured by the music. The more enraptured he was, the more delighted I was to see the music connect like that.
After about an hour of me playing, and Babaji listening and bouncing along, I put down the guitar and we started a conversation—mostly mundane—about his trip to the United States and my shows and music, about yoga and Ram Dass and Be Here Now and what Babaji’s plans were. He said he was thinking of moving to Santa Cruz, but that would depend on whether his visa could be sorted out and whether his sponsor would be able to find a place for them to settle. I told him I lived a little south of Santa Cruz and to please stop in and visit, that he was welcome to stay the night, or even a few days if he needed to.
A short while later he called—an operation that consisted of someone else on the phone talking while Babaji wrote his questions and responses. He said he was coming to Santa Cruz and wanted to visit for a day or two. I said of course, come ahead.
I didn’t exactly know what I was getting into, because Babaji’s arrival brought with it his traveling entourage and a whole outside community of people wanting to meet and talk to him. My little house sat on the side of a hill with terraced gardens and overlooked a great expanse of the Pacific Ocean. The house was older, built entirely of redwood, with small rooms and one kitchen and bath but a very large main room with a huge stone fireplace. The room was big enough for Babaji’s entourage, all of whom sat on the wood floor until it was completely taken over by a school-bus load of hippie-yogis a few orders of magnitude larger than the original I’d met in LA. It was a swarm of people in and out, cooking and cleaning and caring for the children, remarkably well ordered and serene, and Kathryn and I were very happy to have them all. Kathryn had read Be Here Now by then and quickly got on the same page as everyone else. It was thoroughly delightful—peaceful, conscious, and calm.
After a few of these visits Babaji moved to Santa Cruz and set up his yoga center in the hills there. He and I spent many hours alone in conversation during that period. We had time enough alone to talk deeply about yoga, world religions, philosophy, the science and order of being, and soccer. Because he had to write, the conversations about spiritual things were necessarily slow and sometimes slowed to a crawl, but they were always highly charged with meaning.
I started going regularly to visit Babaji at his ashram, but as his followers increased, it became less and less intimate, and the close times on the bed at Sea Ranch and on my living-room floor in the Highlands were fading.
Babaji has written and published an entire body of work, so his teachings are best left to his own words. However, there was one incident I will mention that had a deep effect on me. I was at his ashram one morning as he was starting satsang—a kind of sacred gathering among yogis, usually in the presence of a teacher or guru. It is like a church gathering, but in Babaji’s case it was fairly informal. Often at these gatherings, I would sit by his side at his invitation. From there I could see his chalkboard and would read what he wrote to the crowd. In the early days the crowd was small, somewhere around fifteen or twenty people, and they would ask him questions on theology and scriptural interpretations and so forth.
On this particular morning I sat beside him as usual and was happy to see him as usual. A young couple made their way forward and sat a few feet from Babaji. I could see them clearly. They had a young boy with them, around seven or eight years old, and he seemed quite disturbed, struggling with what appeared to be a severe chronic illness of long standing. The parents seemed more or less used to it, although they were clearly unhappy. The child writhed and twitched in a kind of internal agony. I felt an instant, almost overwhelming, sense of love for the family, a deep concern and care and compassion for the child.
After a few moments and a few questions from the congregation, during a silent pause, the mother asked Babaji if he could heal her child. I don’t remember with much more clarity than amarcord affords, but I recall that Babaji took a short moment to think and then wrote on the board, “No. But he can.” Then he nodded to me to read it to them as he held it up for all to see.
I read the words out loud to the little family, and when I read the words “But he can,” Babaji pointed to me and smiled. I was surprised.
I was unsure what to say or do. Babaji continued to point at me and nodded a yes, meaning, “Yes, him.”
I sort of wagged my head in a gesture that was a cross between “No I can’t” and “I have no idea what he’s talking about, or why he said that.”
The parents looked at me longingly and, I thought, in confusion. It was a most uncomfortable moment, because in their long looks was the incipient question: “Why not? Since he says you can, why won’t you heal our son?”
The truth to my own mind was unequivocal. I hadn’t the slightest idea how to heal that child, even with my upbringing in Christian Science.
I’d had many healings through Science, and those healings were verifiable in my own experience and in my own thought. When Phyllis and I had called a Christian Science practitioner to help us with our infant child, who had all the symptoms of jaundice, the practitioner healed him overnight. Our child went to sleep the color of a carrot and woke up looking normal. I didn’t know whether this was a common occurrence, one expected by medical doctors, only that it happened. When Phyllis was injured in a car accident, the same CS practitioner came to her side and three days later what had appeared to be life-threatening wounds were healed, and she was up happily cooking a large Thanksgiving dinner with me. Again, I did not understand where this fit in nature, but it happened as I have written here.
I had usually been the one healed and not the one doing the healing; my own verification was from the experience, and the experience was always anecdotal. The healing experience in metaphysics always is, because it happens differently every time it happens. But those present know it has happened, testify to it, write about it, trade stories among themselves, and in this way many come to reasonably depend on metaphysical healing. If anecdotes were data, the Christian Science Publishing Society’s library of thousands of sworn accounts and witness-verified testimonies of healing would be overwhelming proof of the effectiveness of spiritual healing.
Sitting next to Babaji at that moment and looking into the eyes of those parents filled me with compassion and an understanding that of all the arts, the healing art was the most demanding, the most important, and the most loving.
I stayed for the rest of the satsang but left immediately afterward, saying nothing to anyone. The moment with Babaji and the sick child and his parents had shaken me. I realized that I had looked to Babaji and to the practice of yoga as a healing practice, among other things; as a relief from the burdens of illness and incapacity, as a cure for ailment. In this moment I was unsure what the yogic practice was and felt as if I had somehow missed the point.
Back in the Highlands, Kathryn and I talked in depth about what Babaji could have meant, and I finally resolved that I did not know and might never, and the best way I had to think of it was to let it stay in my thought as a moment and leave it as it was, etched in amarcord.
Kathryn and I concentrated on setting up a record-distribution company and getting The Prison out as our first release. Because it was a curious piece, to say the least, the going was slow and arduous. The pushback from the press had been devastating; the reviews were aggressively disdainful or cruelly dismissive. But the hippie community I had been orbiting was enthusiastic and embraced the work. Those who enjoyed it needed no rationale, and they were encouraging in their enjoyment. Hope sprang.
We had not managed to sell any records to speak of, only a few hundred, and it looked as if a concert presentation might help open the work to wider appreciation. I decided that I should figure out a way to perform the piece live. This would be difficult, since the work required careful listening and reading at the same time to get the full intended effect. I tried to solve the problem with a presentation where I would read the story and then sing the songs in the interstices of the storytelling. It was a clumsy fix, but it connected with the hippie-yogi culture. I tried it out at a small college north of San Francisco in a presentation that Jots set up. The reaction was very positive, and this gave me more hope.
I decided to try using a dance troupe that would perform to the music, and maybe there would be some way to make that work with the prose as well. I would read the book, the dancers would dance, the songs would inspire, and perhaps all would be fine.
I found the choreographer Carlos Carvajal and his dance troupe in San Francisco, set up a concert performance of The Prison at the Palace of Fine Arts, and began regular rehearsals with them. Even though it felt natural to me, the rehearsals revealed something amiss, ungrounded. I started to feel there was something missing that I could not provide.
I was in my late twenties, and on top of my flagging confidence in The Prison as a play, my mother was beside herself with worry about me and my future, especially now that the counterculture bus had made a stop at my studio. Had it not been for the fact that she liked The Prison, she might have tried to persuade me to leave the arts and show business behind and join her in the office-supply business, but she didn’t. Her marriage was coming apart as well by then and she said she had found some comfort in listening to and reading The Prison.
However, her enjoyment of it did not lessen her reluctance to accept into her life the yogis who had wound their way into mine. Her Carmel visits did become more regular, and our discussions more pointed. She was certain that the hippie element was not spiritual or even cultural but political at its root, and that it was bad for America—and she began to aggressively push this idea. She rejected their spiritual teachings out of hand and encouraged me to stay with her religion and politics.
But my mother was inarticulate to a fault, and even her very good intentions were thwarted again and again by this failing. Her capacity for feeling strong allegiance to her politics and religious doctrine was mixed with an even stronger incapacity for explaining that allegiance. In our conversations, however deep the goodwill between us, this confusion—between explaining a feeling and merely having a feeling—ran time and again, and again ran us aground. She became yet another siren on yet another shore, and it was disturbing. My confidence in the play flagged.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but my notions of a band as a system—like the internal combustion engine as Chick had explained it—were far from accurate. My conception of art-as-applied-science set me at odds with many doctrinal practices, religious as well as political, and with cultural pursuits and capital industry. But I was not alone in this. Indeed, the whole nation was struggling with a new imperative for society, business, politics, and religion. What had started as a dance with LSD and Merry Pranksters, with rock and roll and alternative lifestyles, was taking deep root in the cities and suburbs and forests of Northern California and driving cultural, political, and economic change. Everything was changing. New systems were emerging, systems of thoughts and ideas, systems of living and systems of tools, and I was watching from the epicenter.
A band by its nature brings together its members’ diverse and contrasting ideas and harmonizes them. This shared viewpoint first unifies everyone, then creates an ensemble that strengthens the voices into a choir, and finally raises its message from the mundane to the inspired. Seen in this light, the demands of being part of a band are very different from the demands of being part of the usual industrial hierarchies.
What developed most prominently for me during this time was a question about how to determine whether a system was natural, or more to the point, whether my instincts were to be trusted. So far the answer was a clear no. I was happy to set aside my instincts and my shallow ideas of evolution, since both had regularly betrayed me. But without gentle nature pushing me along, identifying the systems it supports and causes to prosper, I was lost for motivation. The fringe mantra of the seventies, “If it feels good, do it,” would not serve. I could not shake the idea that a higher principle than that must be at work.
I was now in a different kind of mess, but it was the same dilemma I had faced for years. I loved my mother and knew her intentions were good, but her politics and practice of metaphysical doctrine were not helping me any more than Babaji’s good friendship and curious words had.
Trusting my instincts was no longer an option for me. I felt what I needed was a dependable, understandable, and intelligent sense of an actual governing principle, a gravity of mind, an organizing, governing Nature with a capital N. This did not separate me from science or God, but it did set my thinking against the prevailing winds, popular opinion, blind faith, religion in general, and politics in particular.
Christian Science considered scientifically was still vague to me, but I saw truth buried within it that set aside my shallow sense of order and replaced it with a willingness to accept a higher natural order—the real laws of nature, even if I didn’t fully understand them.
The overarching metaphor for The Prison was the understanding that a puzzle stops being a puzzle to anyone who solves it; the solution appears at first to lie through a doorway, but it is a doorway from one side only. Once one is through that apparent doorway, it is easy to look back and see through the illusion of the door. This simple metaphysical fact, while comforting, was not enough, because it was far from complete as a moral basis for living well and right.
My mother understood this dilemma because she shared it to a degree, and she gently and positively encouraged me to at least listen to a leading Christian Science teacher, a man named Paul Seeley. She had recently been to see him and was impressed with his understanding of the teaching. I agreed to give him a listen. It was the least I could do to show my gratitude for all my mother had done for me. As it happened, he was giving a talk in San Francisco when I was going to be in that area giving a performance of The Prison to a group of college students.
I attended the Seeley talk dutifully, and when I arrived, I was surprised at how large the crowd was. Christian Science churches, like all the other churches, were struggling along after the culture shock of the 1960s, and the services were usually held for smaller and smaller congregations. But on this afternoon, at this church, it felt like a rock concert, and the buzz was palpable. The church looked as if it seated close to a thousand people, and the hall was full, as was the balcony. I could not get in to find a seat, so I stood on a landing outside the balcony, where I had a partial view of the side of the stage.
I knew little about Seeley or his reputation in the church. He was a Princeton philosopher and a Harvard lawyer who had begun his work in Portland, Oregon, in 1910 and still lived there. He had lectured and taught for years in the Christian Science church, and reportedly once saw Mary Baker Eddy as she passed in her carriage. He was something of a legend. I could not see him well since I was looking down at him from the balcony, but I could see that he was dressed immaculately in a dark suit, had snow-white hair, and appeared to be somewhere between the ages of sixty and ninety.
I was more curious than interested. I had heard all the stories of healing over the years and had lived among those who practiced, but I had never been able to grasp the fundamentals of Science, or whether it even was a science at all. I knew even less about Christianity and had only a shadow of an idea about what people meant when they talked of God or Spirit. The yogis had a beguiling culture of spiritual worship and practice, in that it was serene and peaceful. The other religions I knew of appeared to be stacked against me and seemed arbitrary and wrong since they were full of scolding and reprimand, which were toxic to the artistic nature and pursuit. It would take something of real substance to overcome these feelings, but I was content to be at this lecture because my attendance discharged my promise to my mother to keep an open mind.
From the moment Seeley started to speak, I knew I was in the presence of something special and unique in my life. The first impression came from how he spoke: eloquently, like an old-time lecturer. He used no microphone, but his voice had no trouble filling the entire hall. He had a commanding presence and spoke loud and clear, with no placeholders like um, and, uh, or anyway. Second, his words were authentic, like a great lyric well sung. He had hold of the basic idea of Science in a way that I had never heard expressed. He carefully unfolded and unpacked the ideas of Spirit and God so they registered as natural and normal. There was no mysticism or supernatural sense; rather, these were facts of existence to be reckoned with and used as part of intelligence. His individual intelligence was as clear as any I had encountered. There was a depth to his inspiration and a clarity to his explanations that put his message a great distance from the jumbled preaching of the rehashers who thumped a Bible and warned of disasters. Seeley spoke about things he knew of. He spoke of Spirit, of our everyday use of it, of our place in it, of our relation to it, all in the same way Uncle Chick spoke of an internal combustion engine. Chick knew what he was talking about, and by listening I knew he knew.
Both men exemplified what they were talking about, exemplified what they knew, but in Seeley’s case these were questions about Life and Being and the foundations of Existence. The talk was over in about ten minutes, but in that ten minutes I knew I had been in the presence of the highest mind I had ever encountered, speaking truth as I had never heard it, establishing in my understanding what was in his understanding. These were ideas I could examine, ponder, and accept or reject according to my own internal compass.
It was Nature at its highest, most beautiful, and—most important to me—at its most artistic and useful, and it was completely and clearly normal. I figured if anybody could teach me Science it was Paul Seeley, and now that I was excited to learn it, I would have to search him out and see if he would.
My mother was happy I had gone to see Seeley, but I didn’t tell her about my reaction to his talk in any detail. There would be time enough for that. For now, I was up to my armpits in rehearsals for The Prison. A lot of people were working on spec with the idea that after our first boffo opening, the seats would be full, the ticket sales would keep us rolling in money, and everyone would get paid.
On opening night it didn’t take long into the performance for me to have the feeling I was a sitting duck. The critics were out in force, and it was a massacre. The lead newspaper critic wrote a one-paragraph review with the headline “I Was Imprisoned by a Monkee,” and it got worse from there. Fortunately, such critical reception did not hurt the record sales, since there were no record sales. I felt especially bad for Carlos, since he and his troupe had done an excellent job, and his choreography had seemed just right and very expressive of the underlying ideas. Sadly, the whole ship sank. The Prison opened and closed in one night. I was down to my last dime and a couple of slim options.
There were other recordings left I had pulled from the ruins of Countryside, but they were all in a state of disarray in the trunk of my car, so to speak. Only two pieces of music had been finished before the Countryside collapse. One was a soundtrack I wrote for a biker movie called The Northville Cemetery Massacre, a low-budget, Roger Corman–esque exploitation feature made by Tom Dyke and Bill Dear, a cameraman/director from Detroit I met in my last days at Countryside. Bill had wondered if I would write the soundtrack. I asked how much the budget for the music was, and he said zero. He wanted me to do it for free, and I said OK, on the condition that he couldn’t ask me for anything specific and had to take what I gave him. He agreed, and we had our deal, so I had that album such as it was.
The other was an album by Swami Nadabrahmananda, whom the school-bus yogis had wanted me to record. He sat cross-legged on the floor of the studio and played the harmonium as he sang raga time counts in a kind of mantra holy-music exercise. I liked the music he made. It had a cadence I later recognized in hip-hop, of all things. I recorded about two hours of music, with him accompanied by tabla and sitar. I had no idea if it was good or not, but I was pretty sure I couldn’t sell it.
For the other Countryside artists, whose projects were at various stages of development, I thought the best thing to do was to return the masters to them and let them have all the rights. I didn’t feel as if I had held up my end of the bargain, and in some ways I just didn’t want them to get hurt or ensnared in the inevitable Countryside crash.
Those three pieces of music were all that really existed, and of those three, only The Prison was mine and complete, and The Prison was now earning the same revulsion from the press and public that I had lived with for a long time. I desperately wished that The Prison might be my Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers, but it clearly wasn’t.
The night of the closing and opening of The Prison, I got drunk on scotch at a small bar next to the Palace of Fine Arts, where we had performed the concert/play. Kathryn and I had not seen the reviews, but we both knew that the show was a disaster. After the performance, the attendees had silently shuffled out like prisoners. As we sat there neither Kathryn nor I said much. The hippie-yogi dance had turned into a grave disappointment and neither of us knew what to do next. The only plan I had was to drive to Portland the next morning to see Paul Seeley. I didn’t want that connection to slip away and had made an appointment to meet him. As I sat there, I drunkenly prayed to the God of all drunks to lead me to the Truth and that Seeley would be the real deal.